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Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

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Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

#101

Post by blackrock »

cachestash wrote: post #89
blackrock wrote: post #12

The cloud appears to be a short term gain to achieve operational readiness and efficiency, but it becomes a long term loss in terms of ongoing operational costs.

> it becomes a long term loss in terms of ongoing operational costs. Based on what, that sounds like something you have just pulled out of the air.

Why rent, when you can buy?

If you’re spending $100k per year on cloud services, then in 10 years, you’ll have spent $1 million. How many software licenses and hardware can you buy for that?

Granted, some services are only online, so you’re at the mercy of your provider on what they want to charge.

Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

#102

Post by jayd16 »

hnarn wrote: post #36

The cloud is the opposite of recession proof. Why do you use the cloud in the first place? Flexibility, scale, ease of operations. What are you gonna do with your servers during a recession, put them on Craigslist? Are you gonna put your entire datacenter on there too? The same mechanic that makes the cloud attractive in the first place is what will bring the hammer down in a serious recession. Companies will turn ev…

There's still the aspect of trading higher total cost for lower initial investment when you use a cloud provider. That won't change and there might be more incentive to think short term.

Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

#103

Post by tedk-42 »

only scrubs call it 'the cloud'

it's about as recession proof as it is idiot proof. As long as people are around, I'm sure businesses will bounce back and overtime, things will begin to return to normal.

Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

#104

Post by tonyedgecombe »

tanilama wrote: post #57
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon as a retailer, sure, but why would this be true for Microsoft (software licenses) or Google (ads)?

Lest not Google. I can't think of how Google can benefit itself from the COVID situation

Advertising spend is usually one of the first things to go in a recession. I expect both Google and Facebook to see revenues fall.

Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

#105

Post by kelnos »

chii wrote: post #51
jlg23 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure a typo and the million wanted to be a kilo? $120m/year for apparently unnecessary IT capacity would be hard to hide even in government contracts...

$120m is not ridiculous for a medium to large enterprise. For an engineering team of ~1000, just the build servers will cost about $1-5m a month (depending on what's being done there).

I work for a company with ~1000 engineers, and our build server spend is much lower than what you suggest. If we were spending even $10k/mo on build servers, heads would roll.

$1M/mo will rent you about 300 c5d.24xlarge servers, at on-demand rates (and of course no medium or large enterprise is paying the higher on-demand rates). I'm pretty sure we're running somewhere on the order of 10 build servers, and they're maybe 4xlarge or 8xlarge boxes.

Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

#106

Post by neuronic »

JackPoach wrote: post #98
nitwit005 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't count on even supposed essentials like food being all that resistant. It used to be that people couldn't cut their food spending significantly because it was mostly the basics of bread or rice to survive. Those days are gone across much of the world. I could cut my food spending to a fairly small fraction of what I am now if I truly needed to.

There's a big difference between what you CAN and what you WILL cut. Alcohol and tobacco aren't necessary to survive. But alcohol consumption is some countries have actually gone UP during the lock down. Not sure about cigarettes, didn't see any stats. We'll see what happens to the food industry. Milk consumption is WAY down, because up to 50% of milk products were sold through restaurants. But wheat and rice produce…

Just to put out a reference here because I have seen numbers in German news yesterday. Alcohol sales for wine and beer are up around 20-30%. In grocery stores. But is that really a hint at overall alcohol sales growing?

For me, I know I buy way more alcohol now in grocery stores. But what about all the alcohol not spent in bars and restaurants??

Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

#107

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

lallysingh wrote: post #84
kortilla wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn’t make money from increased traffic, they make money in ad spend. It doesn’t matter if more people are staying at home if the bottom falls out on the ad buyers.

Somewhat compensated by other ad venues moving online. I don't think all the signs and billboards in Times Square will be as popular as they were before.

Nobody's going to be advertising movies or Broadway shows online or offline for a while.

Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

#108

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Is anything recession proof?

I remember a blog post, I think from Tim Bray, about 15 years ago or so arguing that the people in IT who had great careers went into government during recessions or down periods and out of government during boom times to work on the things that they had specified during the down period.

So maybe Government is recession proof. Seems about right.

Re: Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

#109

Post by ablekh »

cachestash wrote: post #88
carlio wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short version is lockin. Unless you get very careful ops engineers making it truly cloud-agnostic, you can't even move from AWS to GCP without a huge amount of overhead. I'm a contractor and several of the companies I've worked with recently have almost hard-coded their services to expect certain things available to them on GCP or AWS that aren't as easily available on the other. You can argue that they should us…

This is why we choose to sit everything on top of OpenShift, we get Red Hat support 24/7 to run it and if we needed to migrate to a different provider its far less painful as OpenShift abtracts the cloud providers API's away from us. The only real changes we need to make our admin based. Technical changes are very minimal.

OpenShift costs quite a bit. Have you compared, costs- and ROI-wise, the OpenShift approach with an alternative of having a small team of consultants (or internal team, if available) architect your platform in a cloud-agnostic way, based on vanilla K8s, plus required additional OSS packages?
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